Before becoming "privy to the true inwardness of Jewish modernity" one must first break the stranglehold of paradigms - the pious paradigms that preempt the story of Jewish emancipation. The story of the exodus of Jews into Europe in the nineteenth century is a case study in culture shock. The hoped for "goodness of fit" between what Jews expected from emancipation and what Europe had promised its Jews became, instead, "the Jewish problem." The Jewish "great expectations" were utopian; the Gentile promises carried a caveat. An ethnocentric and family-oriented people - "one of the most familistic societies known," Eisenstadt tells us - awoke "the morning after" emancipation to find itself in a world of strangers : the nonkinship, universalistic nation-societies of modern Europe. A slow disintoxication supervenes as Jewish emancipation fails to make good on its promises. ...